Custom Design Challenges
In this competitive world, quality of product and time to market are essential for growth of any semiconductor company. With shrinking technology nodes and increasing circuit sensitivity, the custom designs are becoming more prominent in circuit design space. When design objectives dictate manipulating precise analog quantitiesvoltages, currents, charges, and continuous ratios of parameter values such as resistance and capacitancecompanies turn to custom design. Full-custom design maximizes performance while minimizing area and power. In essence, custom designs provide a final closure to several design challenges and thus requires significant handcrafting by a select set of engineers with very high skill levels. Even then, the design implementation in a new technology node demands significant time and effort in order to overcome design challenges and requires multiple layout trade-offs. In this scenario, custom designers start with the existing and proven designs in other technologies and manually migrate the design to new technology while trying to maintain the old layout characteristics to bring down risk factor. But with increasing layout complexitiy, it is becoming more difficult day by day to address the design challenges and meet the design schedule at the same time.